Student Affairs

Anyone who’s ever been to college knows the old joke about the “freshman 15.” It’s not uncommon for first-year students to gain around 15 pounds during that first year on campus. But having too much to eat is not the problem many of today’s students face. Instead, they’re up against a day-in, day-out problem that never seems to go away: hunger.

Over 40 percent of United States undergraduates enter postsecondary education through community colleges, according to the Community College Research Center, with four-fifths of those students indicating they intend to earn at least a bachelor’s degree. (1) These data highlight the need for community colleges and four-year institutions to ensure the pathways between their campuses are clearly marked and are as roadblock free as possible. Although articulation agreements, dual admission and other transfer strategies are in place at virtually every institution, community college advisors say more needs to be done to strengthen the transfer process.

As educators, we often take for granted the level of personal information we ask students to share with us. In my own experience as an academic advisor, my meetings with students often touch upon the personal, even when on the surface they may seem academic in nature. Yet, although we ask students to share these personal aspects of their lives with us, we rarely share the details of our lives with them. In some professional settings, such as higher education, it can be a challenging experience to straddle the line between being professional and allowing ourselves to be human. However, I believe that it is possible for us to share parts of ourselves, our stories, and our experiences with our students without overstepping boundaries, and in doing so develop trust and meaningful bonds.

If you encounter a distressed student and decide to refer the student to counseling or other psychological services, there are actions you can take to increase the chances the student will follow through. Here are three tips to help increase your chances of success.

There’s no one correct way to deal with students in distress, however, and different faculty and staff members have different capacities for working with distressed students, so it’s important to know your abilities and limits when deciding whether or not to intervene

According to the National Coalition against Domestic Violence (NCADV), domestic and dating violence includes intimidation, emotional abuse, threats, physical violence, and sexual violence. The abuse is part of a “systematic pattern” of behavior the abuser uses to have power over and control of an intimate partner.
It is also something students experience–and something that the Campus SaVE Act (the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act of 2014) compels colleges and universities to know more about.

School administrators are often on the front lines for student trauma—the first person with whom a student confides about incidents that can create significant stress. In turn, many school administrators must also consider how to process these traumas to minimize adversely impacts from their own stress levels.

Basic sexual misconduct trainings are important, but for Title IX compliance and proper sexual misconduct training, administrators should do more. It is important to consider steps to take beyond simply baseline compliance.

English language proficiency does not eliminate all the special challenges that international students face. Cultural differences—particularly among students from non-Western countries—can create additional burdens. For example, international students may experience difficulty understanding spoken English or an instructor’s use of humor, slang, or cultural references; they may experience a type of “academic culture shock” in which the instructor’s expectations are unclear or significantly different from what the students are used to. All these factors can negatively affect academic performance and increase the likelihood that these students will cheat.

“A lot of faculty and administrators assume that if a student passes a language proficiency exam, then the student is prepared to be in the classroom, and that’s not the case. These exams do not test for how to use the language,” says Rory Senerchia, associate professor and chair of the ESL department at Johnson & Wales University Providence, who has conducted surveys of international students to better understand how faculty and institutions can better support these students.

Frequently, academic administrators encounter students who appeal grades, lodge academic complaints, ask for exceptions to academic policies, or otherwise voice dissatisfaction with their academic experience. Frequently, their parents or other family members accompany them, advocate for them, or even request meetings. These encounters force administrators to balance student interests with institutional policies and for that reason often prove stressful and time-consuming. A handful of principles, if consistently applied, can reduce headaches while promoting student success and upholding institutional integrity.